Ray Bradbury
The Wonderful Death of Dudley Stone
«Alive!»
«Dead!»
«Alive in New England, damn it.»
«Died twenty years ago!»
«Pass the hat, I'll go myself and bring back his head!»
That's how the talk went that night. A stranger set it off with his mouthings about Dudley Stone dead. Alive! we cried. And shouldn't we know? Weren't we the last frail remnants of those who had burnt incense and read his books by the light of blazing intellectual votives in the twenties?
_The_ Dudley Stone. That magnificent stylist, that proudest of literary lions. Surely you recall the head-pounding, the cliff-jumping, the whistlings of doom that followed on his writing his publishers this note:
_Sirs: Today, aged 30, I retire from the field, renounce writing, burn all my effects, toss my latest manuscript on the dump, cry hail and fare thee well. Yrs., affect_.
_Dudley Stone_
Earthquakes and avalanches, in that order.
«_Why?_» we asked ourselves, meeting down the years.
In fine soap-opera fashion we debated if it was women caused him to hurl his literary future away. Was it the Bottle? Or Horses that outran him and stopped a fine pacer in his prime?
We freely admitted to one and all, that were Stone writing now, Faulkner, Hemingway, and Steinbeck would be buried in his lava. All the sadder that Stone, on the brink of his greatest work, turned one day and went off to live in a town we shall call Obscurity by the sea best named The Past.
«_Why?_»
That question forever lived with those of us who had seen the glints of genius in his piebald works.
One night a few weeks ago, musing off the erosion of the years, finding each others' faces somewhat more pouched and our hairs more conspicuously in absence, we became enraged over the typical citizen's ignorance of Dudley Stone.
At least, we muttered, Thomas Wolfe had had a full measure of success before he seized his nose and jumped off the rim of Eternity. At least the critics gathered to stare after his plunge into darkness as after a meteor that made much fire in its passing. But who now remembered Dudley Stone, his coteries, his frenzied followers of the twenties?
«Pass the hat,» I said. «I'll travel three hundred miles, grab Dudley Stone by the pants and say: „Look here, Mr. Stone, why did you let us down so badly? Why haven't you written a book in twenty-five years?'“
The hat was lined with cash; I sent a telegram and took a train.
I do not know what I expected. Perhaps to find a doddering and frail praying mantis, whisping about the station, blown by seawinds, a chalk-white ghost who would husk at me with the voices of grass and reeds blown in the night. I clenched my knees in agony as my train chuffed into the station. I let myself down into a lonely country-side, a mile from the sea, like a man foolishly insane, wondering why I had come so far.
On a bulletin board in front of the boarded-up ticket office I found a cluster of announcements, inches thick, pasted and nailed one upon another for uncountable years. Leafing under, peeling away anthropological layers of printed tissue I found what I wanted. Dudley Stone for alderman, Dudley Stone for Sheriff, Dudley Stone for mayor! On up through the years his photograph, bleached by sun and rain, faintly recognizable, asked for ever more responsible positions in the life of this world near the sea. I stood reading them.
„Hey!“
And Dudley Stone plunged across the station platform behind me suddenly. „Is that you, Mr. Douglas!“ I whirled to confront this great architecture of a man, big but not in the least fat, his legs huge pistons thrusting him on, a bright flower in his lapel, a bright tie at his neck. He crushed my hand, looked down upon me like Michelangelo's God creating Adam with a mighty touch. His face was the face of those illustrated North Winds and South Winds that blow hot and cold in ancient mariners» charts. It was the face that symbolizes the sun in Egyptian carvings, ablaze with life!
My God! I thought. And this is the man who hasn't written in twenty-odd years. Impossible. He's so alive it's sinful. I can hear his _heartbeat!_
I must have stood with my eyes very wide to let the look of him cram in upon my startled senses.
«You thought you'd find Marley's Ghost,» he laughed. «Admit it.»
«I―»
«My wife's waiting with a New England boiled dinner, we've plenty of ale and stout. I like the ring of those words. To _ale_ is not to sicken, but to revive the flagging spirit. A tricky word, that. And _stout?_ There's a nice ruddy sound to it. Stout!» A great golden watch bounced on his vest-front, hung in bright chains. He vised my elbow and charmed me along, a magician well on his way back to his cave with a luckless rabbit. «Glad to see you! I suppose you've come, as the others came, to ask the same question, eh! Well, this time I'll tell everything!»
My heart jumped. «Wonderful!»
Behind the empty station sat an open-top 1927-vintage Model-T Ford. «Fresh air. Drive at twilight like this, you get all the fields, the grass, the flowers, coming at you in the wind. I hope you're not one of those who tiptoe around shutting windows! Our house is like the top of a mesa. We let the weather do our broom-work. Hop in!»
Ten minutes later we swung off the highway onto a drive that had not been leveled or filled in years. Stone drove straight on over the pits and bumps, smiling steadily. Bang! We shuddered the last few yards to a wild, unpainted two-story house. The car was allowed to gasp itself away into mortal silence.
«Do you want the truth?» Stone turned to look me in the face and hold my shoulder with an earnest hand. «I was murdered by a man with a gun twenty-five years ago almost to this very day.»
I sat staring after him as he leapt from the car. He was solid as a ton of rock, no ghost to him, but yet I knew that somehow the truth was in what he had told me before firing himself like a cannon at the house.
«This is my wife, and this is the house, and that is our supper waiting for us! Look at our view. Windows on three sides of the living room, a view of the sea, the shore, the meadows. We nail the windows open three out of four seasons. I swear you get a smell of limes here midsummer, and something from Antarctica, ammonia and ice cream, come December. Sit down! Lena, isn't it _nice_ having him here?»
«I hope you like New England boiled dinner,» said Lena, now here, now there, a tall, firmly-built woman, the sun in the East, Father Christmas' daughter, a bright lamp of a face that lit our table as she dealt out the heavy useful dishes made to stand the pound of giants' fists. The cutlery was solid enough to take a lion's teeth. A great whiff of steam rose up, through which we gladly descended, sinners into Hell. I saw the seconds-plate skim by three times and felt the ballast gather in my chest, my throat, and at last my ears. Dudley Stone poured me a brew he had made from wild Concords that had cried for mercy, he said. The wine bottle, empty, had its green glass mouth blown softly by Stone, who summoned out a rhythmic one-note tune that was quickly done.
«Well, I've kept you waiting long enough,» he said, peering at me from that distance which drinking adds between people and which, at odd turns in the evening, seems closeness itself. «I'll tell you about my murder. I've never told anyone before; believe me. Do you know John Oatis Kendall?»
«A minor writer in the twenties, wasn't he?» I said. «A few books. Burnt out by '31. Died last week.»
«God rest him.» Mr. Stone lapsed into a special brief melancholy from which he revived as he began to speak again.
«Yes. John Oatis Kendall, burnt out by the year 1931, a writer of great potentialities.»
«Not as great as yours,» I said, quickly.
«Well, just wait. We were boys together, John Oatis and I, born where the shade of an oak tree touched my house in the morning and his house at night, swam every creek in the world together, got sick on sour apples and cigarettes together, saw the same lights in the same blonde hair of the same young girl together, and in our late teens went out to kick Fate in the stomach and get heat on the head together. We both did fair, and then I better and still better as the years ran. If his first book got one good notice, mine got six, if I got one bad notice, he got a dozen. We were like two friends on a train which the public has uncoupled. There went John Oatis on the caboose, left behind, crying out, „Save me! You're leaving me in Tank Town, Ohio; we're on the same track!“ And the conductor saying, „Yes, but not the same _train!_“ And myself yelling, „_I_ believe in you, John, he of good heart, I'll come back for you!“ And the caboose dwindling behind with its red and green lamps like cherry and lime pops shining in the dark and we yelling our friendship to each other: „John, old man!“ „Dudley, old pal!“ while John Oatis went out on a dark siding behind a tin baling-shed at midnight and my engine, with all the flag-wavers and brass bands, boiled on toward dawn.»